What I Can ' t Say

One day in the not to distant future all bloggers may need to ask the question or face the wrath of the federal government. What am I permitted to say and what am I forbidden from speaking about?  This may seem to be a bit over the top, but looking at how the current administration operates and at some happenings around the world it may be a closer reality than we think. On February 28, 2009, I wrote a blog titled, When They Silence The Opposition. In the post I was primarily dealing with the Fairness Doctrine and Localism. It was a concern of the administration's view that, akin to the Tass News Agency, they should be able to control the news and opinion that the masses receive via the airwaves, and now the internet. The matter at stake is our freedom of speech. In order to control the people, free speech must be curtailed. Just ask anyone from Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, China, Iran or Cuba. Here are a few of the items that raise my level of concern.  One is the internet kill switch that gives a President power to shut down the internet. In a day when politics involves "never letting a good crisis go to waste" as a strategy, what could be conjured up by an administration to deem it necessary to shut things down at a time that is opportune to them? From FOXNews.com:

A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties. Details of a revamped version of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 emerged late Thursday, months after an initial version authored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., was blasted in Silicon Valley as dangerous government intrusion. "In the original bill they empowered the president to essentially turn off the Internet in the case of a 'cyber-emergency,' which they didn't define," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents the telecommunications industry.

Another is appointments such as the nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as legal adviser for the State Department. Bringing international law into play and overriding our own laws opens the door to removing our national sovereignty from the world stage just as state sovereignty has been all but removed from the national stage. From wnd.com:

In Fordham Law Review, Koh asserted that the U.S. "Supreme Court is divided between two judicial camps: the transnationalists and the nationalists." Koh considers himself a transnationalist and justices Roberts, Scalia and Alito nationalists. Koh explained the differences between these two judicial philosophies. According to Koh, transnationalist judges look to U.S. interdependence, whereas nationalists tend to look to U.S. autonomy. Transnationalists think about how U.S. law fits into a framework of transnational law, while nationalists see a rigid foreign and domestic divide. Transnationalists think that courts can "domesticate" international law (make it part of our law), whereas nationalists think that only the political branches can. Transnationalists favor the development of a global legal system, while nationalists prefer a national legal system. In other words, nationalists don't believe that it's appropriate to look to foreign law in interpreting our Constitution. They believe that only the political branches, not the courts, can adopt provisions of international law, and they don't believe in slavish deference to global legal authorities, such as the International Criminal Court. Transnationalists clearly believe in an ever-changing, living Constitution and reject originalism (interpreting the Constitution according to its original understanding). They are obviously globalists, not overly concerned with American's national sovereignty. They see the international community, in the words of Koh, as a "community of reason" and believe that American judges, in interpreting our Constitution, can resort to this "community of reason" (foreign laws) to choose between two "plausible" legal positions. Indeed, Koh wrote approvingly of United States Supreme Court decisions acknowledging "evolving standards of decency" and that we may look to this global community of reason to determine what those standards are.

Then comes this article posted today on World Net Daily,

'Thought police' slam media with fine totaling $125,000

Whether it is out of the book "1984" or whether it is the changing political and social landscape, the thought police are on their way to a laptop near you. There is a video in the article that is well worth seeing. An elderly lady who disagreed with an event was harassed first by participants and later by authorities. Free speech is going by the wayside. Once gone, those in power can control the information flow. Or should I say disinformation? The bogus "Hate Crimes" bills and legislation that are popular these days are no more than a smoke screen for moving forward agendas that the majority of citizens would be against if given the truth and the choice. It is all part of the rampant deceit in politics as language is reinvented and nuances are parsed such as wondering what the definition of "is" is.

Timothy Noah, Posted Sunday, Sept. 13, 1998, at 9:14 PM ETYears from now, when we look back on Bill Clinton's presidency, its defining moment may well be Clinton's rationalization to the grand jury about why he wasn't lying when he said to his top aides that with respect to Monica Lewinsky, "there's nothing going on between us." How can this be? Here's what Clinton told the grand jury (according to footnote 1,128 in Starr's report): "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

And back to my article of 02/28/09:

But why would the Government want to control what the people hear?  The reason the recent rash of spending bills have been pushed through quickly, always a crisis that needs immediate attention, is that the longer the wait for the vote, the more the people learn, the more they get upset, the more they speak up, the more they contact their legislators.  As each day passes, the public opinion drops and the vote is made more difficult.  As the ruling party tries to push through its agenda, they do not want to be questioned or defied. Funny, one of the ten pillars of communism is: 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.